Abstract

A growing number of Italian political scientists has recently rediscovered the analysis of interest groups. Nevertheless, comparative research in Italy is still scarce, and the most recent policy studies focus only on sector-based aspects: in other words, to the best of our knowledge, there are no systematic empirical analyses of the Italian «Interest Group System» (IGS) as a whole. Thus, in this work we fall back upon the concept of IGS to describe the Italian case: firstly, we derive from the most important literature its fundamental characteristics; secondly, we test them through an empirical analysis of the national press between 1992 and 2013. Our hypotheses deal with the very high level of concentration of the Italian IGS (with labour unions and business groups prevailing), its diachronic trend to a slowly growing pluralism, and a sort of partisanship of different news outlets with respect to group types.